Main fields & research methods
Development Economics, Public Economics, Law and Economics, Public Policy Evaluation, Firms and informality, Network Economics, Social norms
RCTs, lab-in-the-field experiments, non-experimental methods; collaboration with government institutions, (creation of) administrative datasets, conducting field surveys
Publications
"The speed of justice" (with Florence Kondylis). 2023. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 105(3): 596–613.
Summary: VoxDev column (2018).
"Social status and egalitarianism in non-lineage-based, agrarian communities in sub-Saharan Africa: An analysis of funeral attendance " (with Abigail Barr). 2025. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 73(3): 1527-1557.
Working papers
"The magic of the game: Experimental evidence on sports betting behavior" (with Martin Chegere, Paolo Falco, Marco Nieddu, Lorenzo Pandolfi). CSEF Working Paper 655. Conditional acceptance, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
"Fraud detection under limited state capacity: Experimental evidence from Senegal" (with Léo Czajka and Bassirou Sarr). CSEF Working paper 731.
"Know-how and know-who: Effects of a randomized training on network changes between small urban entrepreneurs". CSEF Working Paper 622.
“Fostering official trade: Beliefs and informal trade at the Kenya-Uganda border” (with Paolo Falco and Eleanor Wiseman). Working paper (based on high-frequency follow-up surveys, endline ongoing, RCT).
Policy papers
"Data management at the Senegalese Tax Authority: Insights from a long-term research collaboration" (with Léo Czajka, Florence Kondylis, and Bassirou Sarr). 2022. African Tax Administration Paper 27, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.
Ongoing projects
"Firms' supply chain networks and tax compliance" (with Florence Kondylis, Bassirou Sarr and Léo Czajka) (multi-year project, 2nd RCT ongoing)
"Emerging egalitarian norms: Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment" (with Abigail Barr) (data analysis ongoing)
„Inter-firm contracting at the intersection between formal and informal sectors” (with Léo Czajka, Florence Kondylis and Matteo Moracci) (data analysis ongoing)
„Impact evaluation of the ITC-INTEGRA youth job creation program in Guinea” (mit Thomas Eeckhout, Benjamin Rühl und Mohamed Barro) (internal working paper)
"Social learning or spillovers - Indirect effects of technical and business skills training for small entrepreneurs" (with Francisco Campos, Obert Pimhidzai, Markus Goldstein and Bilal Zia) (dormant)
Ongoing grants
Principal Investigator: Firm Networks and Sustainable Development, PRIN PNRR 2022 [Italian Government grant program for Research Projects of National Interest], Nov 2023-Feb 2026, grant amount: 299.797€